Students of Marcellus Driver Middle School at the agriculture building.
You don’t have to know what FFA stands for. You don’t have to have a plan. You don’t even have to be old enough to join. You just have to walk into a space where agriculture feels real.
In New York, that’s what Marcellus’s agriculture building is. A place where curiosity comes before credentials, and where learning starts with hands in the soil instead of notes on a page. Preschoolers plant seeds for the first time. Elementary students explore gardens, orchards and tools they’ve only seen in books. While all of this is happening, older students slow down, explain and realize that leadership doesn’t always look like standing in the front of a classroom; it often looks like standing beside someone smaller.
No one is checking grades at the door. No one is asking about your background or experience. What matters is the moment a student realizes agriculture isn’t distant or complicated; it’s something they can touch, try and be part of.
Learning Looks Different Here
This building isn’t just a classroom. It’s a greenhouse, a garden, an orchard, a kitchen, a maple production room and a sawmill all built into how students learn. You’re not handed a packet and told to pick up your pencil for the rest of the period; you’re asked to do something real. To plant, build, problem-solve and figure things out hands on. Learning happens through experience, not worksheets, and students who are actively working in this building leave with skills they didn’t have before.
By the time joining FFA becomes a possibility, students already understand and thrive in this space and agriculture isn’t new to them; it’s something they have been a part of.
Where it Starts
You don’t have to know your future. You don’t have to know where it’s taking you. You don’t even have to know when it begins.
That’s how it starts here at Marcellus. Not with a title or a jacket, but with experience — the kind that stays with you long before you ever decide what agriculture will mean in your future.
